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Hi everyone. What is the best technique to use when creating a truly impressive black and white image? I've seen a few articles and videos that have contrasting opinions. pun not intended. hehe. Some prefer the channel mixer, but it's quite difficult to fine tune. The curves are then another favorite of some people. what would be the best combination or tool to use? i have a great interest in portrait/ model photography and i really like black and white images. i don't have lighting equipment as of yet so i have to rely mostly on natural light and the digital darkroom for the effect. thanks!
If you have CS3 or CS4 try the Photoshop Black and White tool, if you want to do it with a RAW file and you can use DPP convert so (my favourite)
Every image is different, and requires a different approach. It all depends on the style you want. Check out The lights right, and luminous landscape for articles.
I tend to use individual RGB channels, with layer masks or the Rob Carr method particularly for people stuff. I have never really got on with channel mixer, as it treats all the image the same, applying the same blend of how much of the RGB channels are applied to each pixel. For example open an image (colour) then click on the channels tab, then look at each channel on its own and see how it varies for each channel.
But I will watch this with interest as its something I'm looking to improve on.
I recently discovered this bit of software, really easy to use and great results - Silver Efex Pro from Nik software. (its a Photoshop plugin by the way)
Cheers
Nik
Quote: Hi everyone. What is the best technique to use when creating a truly impressive black and white image?
Maybe if you explained what you mean by "truly impressive" we'd have a better idea? And contrary to your username, I take it that film is out of the question? 
Thanks for the tips everyone. Well, by truly impressive i just mean that when you look at the photo you go "wow". I really like to see black and white images that have the right amount of contrast, so it enhances what needs to be enhanced. At present, i want to focus more on black and white portrait/model images.
Louis, some b&w has very little contrast. You probably want punchy black and white with rich blacks.
To achieve that you need to be able to control which colours turn black, which white, which are gray.
Do you want grey skies, white skies, black skies, do you want people to have bright eyes or dark eyes. Study the links I posted above.
I have found Lightroom perfect for me. At the lower end of the scale Picassa does a reasonable job, and that is free.
You do have to preconceive the image in monochrome before you take the shot that will mean ignoring any colour sensations and concentrate on shape and texture with whatever lighting.
Ken
I like my B&W photo's to have a film-like quality to them, so I use AlienSkin's Exposure2 plugin... 'tis the mutt's nuts
There are a whole raft of ways to produce B&W, and each has it's own pro's and cons. I also find that different techniques work on different images and there is no universal one size fits all.
I usually statr with channel mixer, but sometimes this just doesn't quite work so I start getting more creative - for example, try using a pair of hue and saturation layers - use the top layer to desaturate, set the lower layer to colour mode then tweak each colour to taste.
Recently I saw a demo of nik silver effex pro (see link above) and I was mightily impressed - then I saw the price (deflated my enthusiasm a bit).
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